Early release of prisoners opposed

An inmate at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa waits for a gate to be opened. Overcrowding at the prison has been reduced since the state shifted responsibility for certain lower-level inmates to the county jails in an effort to help fix the state budget and reduce prison overcrowding.
— Howard Lipin

An inmate at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa waits for a gate to be opened. Overcrowding at the prison has been reduced since the state shifted responsibility for certain lower-level inmates to the county jails in an effort to help fix the state budget and reduce prison overcrowding.
— Howard Lipin

In the two years since the phrase “public safety realignment” became part of California’s plan to ease prison overcrowding, local and state officials seem to have spent as much time and energy explaining what it is as they have what it isn’t.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to cut costs and reduce the prison population allowed many lower-level felons who finished their time behind bars to be supervised by county authorities rather than state parole.

It did not — the officials stressed — authorize early release from prison.

But they may have to change their rhetoric in light of a ruling from a panel of three federal judges who ordered the state this month to reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of capacity by the end of the year or risk being cited for contempt.

Detention and probation officials in San Diego County have said they lack the personnel and the funding to deal with an estimated 800 offenders who would be returned here upon their release. Questions remain as to what types of inmates would be released — in terms of their dangerousness and risk for committing new crimes — and at what rate.

“I believe the order is overreaching,” said Mack Jenkins, the San Diego County’s chief probation officer and head of the committee that oversees the county’s realignment plan.

Although the Probation Department has increased staff significantly and created a special division to handle nonviolent and nonserious offenders, Jenkins said the early releases from prison would require the department to add another 20 officers.

Jenkins and Sheriff Bill Gore said they support the governor’s effort to protest the court order, which Brown said would mandate the release of 10,000 California inmates by Dec. 31.

The governor’s administration on Friday asked the panel of federal judges to delay its order to give the state time to appeal the decision to the nation’s high court.

If the three judges reject the request for a stay, the state said it intends to seek a reprieve from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who oversees appeals from California and other Western states. A stay could delay inmate releases by a year while the justices consider California’s appeal.

Gore, whose department runs San Diego County’s seven jails, said keeping the local inmate population under court-mandated caps remains a challenge under the public safety realignment law, which allowed certain offenders to be sentenced to years in local custody instead of being sent to prison.

But he again acknowledged that realignment, which took effect on Oct. 1, 2011, has gone a long way to reach to state’s goals under the law.

“I think you have to look at what’s been done already,” Gore said, adding that the state dropped its prison population by 30,000 over 18 months.

That’s a big move in the right direction, he said, despite the state’s failure to reach the 40,000-inmate reduction by this month as the courts had previously ordered.

“Let’s see how this downsizing continues to go,” Gore said. “Why put public safety at risk for an artificial deadline?”

It’s not yet clear whether the inmates to be released from prison would be supervised by probation or parole authorities. Either way, realignment would require those who violate the terms of their release be sent to jail, not prison.

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, the senior policy advocate for the San Diego chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it would be more useful at this point for state and local authorities to spend their energy talking about ways to comply with the court order safely rather than their opposition to it.

“Clearly, returning conditions in California state prisons to constitutional minimum standards is a good thing,” Dooley-Sammuli said. “A one-time reduction (early release) doesn’t address the real fundamental issues that got us to this point.”

In its 51-page ruling, the panel of federal judges recounted the history of these proceedings, which arose from two class-action lawsuits that accused the state of violating the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The class actions — the first began in 1990, the second in 2001 — involved the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s repeated failure to provide adequate mental and medical heath care to its overflowing prison population.

In August 2009, the federal court ordered state authorities to reduce the prison population to 137.5 percent within two years. According to court documents, the court spent 10 out of 14 trial days exploring the issue of public safety. The court identified several ways to reduce the prison population it said would not adversely affect public safety, including early release.